CD Reviews

The Nashville Sound, The Outlaw Movement, or Just Waylon?

Kevin B. Moses | Memphis, TN United States | 01/29/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"In our rush to file this music and forget it, zealous reviews attempt to label, attempt to stamp, package and place. Is this really the nashville sound everyone claims? Of course we know what it isn't and that is outlaw music, but what it also isn't is a product, something manufactured, a false peg in a square hole. It's simply waylon.

Waylon has sung about lying woman and bottles of whiskey and trucks and bar fights. Here he delves deeper in his soul like I have never heard before on any waylon album. One listen to The Road or Love of the Common People convinces me than Waylon felt these lyrics deeply. The new waylon, at his outlaw best, would not have given a rat's BEE-hind about sounding convincing on a lyric, because he WAS the lyric and had become it, even before he sung it. He was a ramblin' man. He didn't have to convince you of that and so his level of interest in delivering a lyric on those songs were somewhere in between couldn't give a **** and I wish you would say something. Here he convinces you. That's the difference.

Does the nashville sound rear its head? Of course it does. But songs like The Road, The Chokin Kind, You Got to Hid Your Love Away, Love of the Common People, Money Cannot Make the Man, Two Streaks of Steal, rescue the album and become, dare I say, classics and I only wished I could have heard them played live.

This collection of songs is finally one of my favorite waylon albums, rivaled only by Honky Tonk Heros and Waylon Live and any walyon fan would be remiss to miss out on it. I can only imagine what these songs would have been like in the artists mature hands, but sadly, waylon would lay them down. All due, I suppose, to his foolish pride or whatever this era of music meant to him. Thankful we have this album to remind us of them once again."